1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns remotely obtaining temporary exclusive control of devices. More particularly, the present invention relates to remotely obtaining exclusive control of a device via a network by determining whether the device is available for a user, requesting remote exclusive control, to obtain exclusive control, and either providing the user with remote exclusive control or adding the user to a reservation queue of users requesting exclusive control of the device.
2. Description of the Related Art
When printing print jobs to a printer, once the print jobs are printed out, a recipient must go to the printer in order to retrieve the hardcopy printout. Often, upon arriving at the printer to retrieve his printout, the recipient discovers that his hardcopy printout is not there. This may be because the recipient's print job is still pending in the print queue behind other print jobs, or because the print job may have been accidentally or intentionally taken by someone else. A similar problem arises with regard to facsimile transmissions. To address this problem, systems have been contemplated that defer printing a print job or a facsimile transmission until the recipient is present at the printer/facsimile.
One method of deferring printing of a facsimile transmission is known with regard to a Canon Laser Class 7000/7500 facsimile machine. This facsimile machine defers printing a transmission received by the facsimile machine by storing the transmission in a confidential electronic mailbox. The data is held in the mailbox until a person having the proper mailbox code arrives at the facsimile machine and enters the proper code to retrieve the data from the mailbox. Once the proper mailbox code has been entered, the transmission is printed by the facsimile machine.
One method of deferring printing in printers is to require recipient authentication in order for the print job to be printed. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/411,665 entitled “Authenticated Secure Printing”, filed Oct. 4, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,862,583, the contents of which are hereby incorporated by reference into the subject application as if set forth herein in full, describes a method of requiring recipient authentication in order to print secure documents. Briefly, the application describes a method where a user provides unique identification information that is submitted with a print job to a print node. Upon receiving the print job and unique identification information, the print node encrypts the print job and stores it in a secure manner. In order to retrieve the secure print job from the printer, a person having the proper authentication information provides this information to the printer, whereby the printer processes and prints out the print job.
Another method of deferring printing of a document until receiving recipient authentication has been described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,633,932 to Davis et al. According to the patent, a print job and a header are sent to a print node in encrypted format. If the document is considered to be “sensitive”, then an indication that the document is sensitive is placed in an electronic header identifying the document as sensitive. Upon receiving the encrypted document and header, the print node decrypts the header to determine if the document is sensitive; if so, the document is stored until the print node receives authentication from the recipient. Thereafter, the “sensitive” document is printed.
The foregoing methods provide a way to defer printing until receiving authentication of the recipient. However, none of these methods addresses the further control of printing operations after the recipient has been authenticated. More particularly, in each of the foregoing methods, after the recipient has been authenticated, all print jobs pending in the print queue before the recipient's print job continue to print in the order they were received by the queue. Accordingly, the recipient has to wait until other print jobs pending before his are printed before his print job is printed. Moreover, the authenticated recipient is not able to select a print job to print from among those pending in the queue. Additionally, if the recipient submits a print job after he has been authenticated, he may have to be authenticated again in order for the newly submitted print jobs to print. Further, the recipient is only able to print print jobs that have been received by the queue and is not able to manually access a remote storage location and download a print job to print.
Additional concerns arise with regard to accurate accounting of resources used in printing operations, such as the amount and type of paper used and the amount of ink used. In more detail, accurate accounting of resources may be desired in order to bill a particular department within an office or a particular person using the resources. Accounting is most commonly accomplished by software in a print server that tracks print jobs based on who submitted the print job. However, this accounting method does not accurately reflect the actual recipient who is using the resources, but only identifies the sender or sending department. This becomes particularly apparent where one department such as an accounting department, requests that another department such as an engineering department, send it a copy of a document. In this case, the sender (engineering) would be billed for resources whereas the recipient (accounting) is actually using the resources. As a result, the sender is billed for resources that they are not using.
Further concerns may arise where a user is out of the office and therefore is not physically at the printer in order to be able to obtain control of the printer and to have his print job printed out. For instance, the user may be late arriving to the office and may not have had the opportunity to print out his print job for distribution at a meeting. Due to his late arrival at the office, he may not have sufficient time to print out his print job in time for the meeting. In this case, a way for the user to obtain control of a printer and print out his print job while he is out of the office so that it is ready for pickup when the user arrives at the office would be desirable.
One way to remotely print a print job by manually altering a print job's position within a queue has been described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,184,996 (hereinafter referred to as the '996 patent). According to the '996 patent, a user can remotely connect to a web server of a printer using a web browser. Using the web browser, the user can then request to view the print queue of the printer and select a print job to advance within the queue. However, the print job can only be advanced within the queue based on its priority level and can not be advanced within the queue ahead of a print job with a higher priority. Moreover, the '996 patent's approach requires manual manipulation of the queue. That is, the user must connect to the printer's web server and manually select a print job to be advanced. Thus, the '996 patent's approach is somewhat labor intensive on the user. A further problem is that, if the user wants to advance his print job ahead of all others to have it printed out immediately, he is not able to do so if any of the print jobs pending in the queue before his print job have a higher priority.
Another problem with the '996 patent's approach is that the user does not have actual control over the queue itself, and as a result, once the user advances a print job in the queue, a different user could also connect to the printer's web server and advance their print job ahead of the first user's print job. Therefore, although the first user may have advanced a print job in the queue, he may lose the advanced position within the queue to another user since he does not have control over the queue and has no way of preventing another user from accessing the queue. Accordingly, what is needed is a way for a user to gain control over a device's capabilities that denies other user's access to the device and to be able to have their print job(s) advanced in the queue and printed out without requiring manual manipulation of the queue.
Additional concerns regarding exclusive control of a device arise where a user attempts to gain remote control of the device, but is denied control because the device may be busy, is already controlled by another person, or may be temporarily out of order. In this case, the user's request for control may be continually denied and the user would have to repeatedly attempt to gain control. Therefore, the user can only obtain control if they request control of the device at a time when the device is available. Accordingly, what is needed is a way for a user to be able to obtain control of a device's capabilities without having to repeatedly request control.